Community Education - A Community Education Class Exhibition - The Art and Music Exhibition

This exhibition was a great success. It almost broke even, the organizers, Janice Giles and myself, carried a modest loss, the musicians all got paid a share of the door to cover expenses and about a dozen works were sold.

But the real success was that a community education life drawing class comprizing about 20 people aged from 14 to 72 and a bunch of musician friends should put on a great exhibition to entertain people and celebrate local talent.

And the Saturday night was fabulous, original art, drawings paintings and sculptures, all drawn from life or imagination and original music played live. Bliss.

And this great exhibition came from one small community education class in one small town and is testament to the value of community education in New Zealand and the short sighted lunacy of the present bunch of right wing, money worshipping, shallow, arrogant, elitist, toadying bean counters in power in this country. Ah.. nothing like a wee self righteous tirade to make me feel better... roll on election day..

Eli Mulvay wows the crowd with his original music and is in his turn impressed as other musos just slip in behind him and start playing lead and slide and percussion along with him.
Awesome talent. I am not a musician but get inspiration from live music, it's the one art form that is completly in the here and now, has immediate emotional impact and flows on like life itself...

Children's art from Waihi Central Primary school. Gorgeous..
We also framed and exhibited 16 year old's art from Waihi College

The Artist's Blues

Bridie sings the blues

I've noticed that I usually write on this blog when I'm feeling upbeat or I've been mulling over something and start to write about it and get to feel upbeat as the writing flows along in it's own way and it all ends up sounding great ( Great!!!! ).

But it's not all great and I read my posts and think I am a phoney or at least not telling the whole story.


Yesterday was nice weather and a girlfriend drove me and my diesel 4 wheel drive to Cambridge to pick up paintings from the R18 exhibition which ended on Sunday.
There was good and bad news: none of the paintings sold-bad I suppose. My paintings had higher prices than all the others-not bad or good, maybe just interesting. The lady that owns the gallery got a crush on one of the paintings and wanted to keep it on display there-good, yes.

And this painting, called "the cradling of femininity" (you can see it on the R18 post further down this page) is displayed in a prime spot in the gallery, it's own area with lights and everything that says check this out here is a painting worthy of your attention.....

Great.

I've had emotional entanglements with two different girlfriends very recently and that and everything else happening in the art scene has worn me out and I feel flat as.
Not the sort of flat that can be relieved by a few drinks, my normal out of the blues, 'cause now I realize that I've lost my driver's licence through drinking and driving and maybe I have a drinking problem.....

Is it possible that I am less than perfect? How can that be in a perfect universe of which I am part? And what a crushing blow to my vanity.... lot's of times other people have made attacks on my fragile self esteem but for my own good self to make an attack on my fragile self esteem by coming up with the nasty, insidious suggestion that I may have a drinking problem is the worst, buddy, the worst. Life fuckin sucks sometimes...

So there you go, balance is restored to this blog in that living the life of an artist is not all beer and skittles and what goes up must come down and moderation in all things and honest self evaluation and that other boring shit when all I want to do is soar....

Roll on the next natural high and painting inspiration, for today is just the opposite.